Five. Presentation of Characters

Charles Dickens: An Introduction to His Novels

[E. D. H. Johnson's Charles Dickens: An Introduction to His Novels originally appeared three decades ago (1969) in the paperback Random House Study in Language and Literature Series. It has been included in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the late author's family.

The original text has almost no notes. All links have been added by GPL.

Page breaks in the paperback edition have been indicated within the text by [5/6] in order to permit readers to cite original page numbers.]

If you want your public to believe in what you write you must believe in it yourself. When I am describing a scene I can as distinctly see what I am describing as I can see you now. So real are my characters to me that on one occasion I had fixed
I upon the course which one of them was to pursue. The character, however, got hold of me and made me do exactly the opposite to wbat I bad intended; but I was so sure that he was right and I was wrong that I let him have his own way.
— Charles Dickens, quoted by Henry Fielding Dickens, Harper's Monthly Magazine, CXXIX (1914)

It is remarkable that what we call the world, which is so very credulous in what professes to be true, is most incredulous in what professes to be imaginary; and that, while, every day in real life, it will allow in one , man no blemishes, and in another no virtues, it will seldom admit a very strongly-marked character, eitber good or bad, in a fictitious narrative, to be within the limits of probability. — Nicholas Nickleby, Preface

In seasons of pestilence, some of us will have a secret attraction to the disease — a terrible passing inclinationto die of it. And all of us have like wonders hidden in our breastsn only needing circumstances to evoke them. — A Tale of Two Cities, Book Three, Chapter 6

he characters in Dickens' novels are real in the
same way that characters in plays are real, and in the same way,
perhaps, that living people seem real to each other. Their
true identities are
masked even from themselves under conventionally
prescribed poses, yet declare themselves through all
kinds of surface clues: not only in the overt act, but
in its accompanying gesture and facial expression; not
just in the spoken word, but in the intonation and
turn of speech with which it is uttered. Dickens'
method of characterization does not allow for the
delicate probing of psychological states of mind; rather
its success depends on the artist's resourcefulness in
creating consistent and emphatically defined patterns
of individualized responses to external circumstance;
in showing, that is to say, character in action.
Like Browning's
Fra Lippo, whose "soul and sense"
grew "sharp alike" through early neglect, Dickens
might have traced to his waiflike boyhood in the
London streets his preternatural alermess to "the look
of things," the tokens of dress or mannerism which
differentiate one personage from another. But
unless this acuity of vision had been tempered by the
additional faculties of insatiable curiosity about human
behavior [115/116] and a genial, if
sometimes caustic, sympathy
with its oddities, the novelist would never have
achieved the comprehensive humanity which informs
his attitude towards his creatures.
"His genius," Forster well remarked, "was his fellow feeling
with his race; his mere personality was never the bound
or limit to his perceptions, however strongly sometimes it might
colour them...."

Incredible though they often are, the beings who
populate Dickens' stories command assent because of
the vitality imparted to them by their creator's own
transparent belief in their reality. "No man,"
according to Forster, "had ever so surprising a faculty as
Dickens of becoming himself what he was
representing . . ."; and the critic George Henry Lewes wrote:
"Dickens once declared to me that every word said by
his characters was distinctly heard by him...."
These statements are corroborated by Mary Dickens'
account of seeing her father act out the fictional roles
which he was imagining. The novelist's instructions to
his illustrators are further evidence of the fact that
his characters had assumed in the mind's eye the
lineaments of living people. And frequent references to
works in hand indicate the extent to which the writer
became immersed in the lives of their characters. As
he approached the end of The Old Curiosity Shop, he
confessed to his future biographer: "I went to bed last
night utterly dispirited and done up. All night I have
been pursued by the child; and this morning I am
unrefreshed and miserable." Of the emotional toll
exacted by his Christmas book, "The Chimes," he
wrote to Forster:

Since I conceived, at the beginning of the second part,
what must happen in the third, I have undergone as much
sorrow and agitation as if the thing were real; and have
[116/117]
wakened up with it at night. I was obliged to lock myself
in when I finished it yesterday, for my face was swollen
for the time to twice its proper size, and was hugely
ridiculous.

Forster is undoubtedly correct in associating Dickens'
closeness to his characters with his keen dramatic sense:

He had the power of projecting himself into shapes and
suggestions of his fancy which is one of the marvels of
creative imagination, and what he desired to express he
became. The assumptions of the theatre have the same
method at a lower pitch, depending greatly on personal
accident; but the accident as much as the genius fayoured
Dickens, and another man's conception underwent in his
acting the process which in writing he applied to his own.

E. M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel drew on
Dickens to illustrate his theoretical disapproval of
two-dimensional or "flat" characters. Yet, impressed
by the "wonderful feeling of human depth" conveyed
by many of these figures, he had to concede that the
novelist's "immense success with types suggests that
there mav be more in flatness than the severer critics
admit." Forster's argument had in part been anticipated
by George Santayana in an important essay on
Dickens. No one has better described the conventional
point of view which finds it more comfortable to
pretend that Dickens is a mere caricaturist:

He was the perfect comedian. When people say Dickens
exaggerates, it seems to me thev can have no eyes and
no ears. They probably have oniy notions of what things
and people are; they accept them conventionally, at their
diplomatic value. Their minds run on in the region ofSx
discourse, where there are masks only and no faces, ideas
and no facts; they have little sense for those living
grimaces that play from moment to moment upon the
[117/118]
countenance of the world. The world is a perpetual
caricature of itself; at everv moment it is the mockery and the
contradiction of what it is pretending to be. But as it
nevertheless intends all the time to be something different
and highly dignified, at the next moment it corrects and
checks and tries to cover up the absurd thing it was, so
that a conventional world, a world of masks, is
superimposed on the realitv, and passes in every sphere of human
interest for the realitv itself. Humour is the perception of
this illusion, the fact allowed to pierce here and there
through the convention, whilst the convention continues
to be maintained, as if we had not observed its absurdity.
Pure comedy is more radical, cruder, in a certain sense
less human; because comedy throws the convention over
altogether, revels for a moment in the fact, and brutally
says to the notions of mankind, as if it slapped them in
the face, There, take that! That's what you really are!
At this the polite world pretends to laugh, not tolerantly
as it does at humour, but a little angrily. It does not like
to see itself by chance in the glass, without having had
time to compose its features for demure
self-contemplation. "What a bad mirror," it exclaims,
"it must be concave or convex; for surely I never looked
like that. Mere
caricature, farce and horse play. Dickens exaggerates; I
never was so sentimental as that, I never saw anything so
dreadful; I don't believe there were ever any people like
Quilp, or Squeers, or Serjeant Buzfuz." But the polite
world is lying; there are such people; we are such people
ourselves in our true moments, in our veritable impulses;
but we are careful to stifle and hide those moments from
ourselves and from the world; to purse and pucker
ourselves into the mask of our conventional personality, and
so simpering, we profess that it is very coarse and inar-
tistic of Dickens to undo our life's work for us in an
instant and to remind us of what we are.

There is no reason to quarrel with Forster's
assertion that Dickens' characters ultimately derive from
the "humours" of Jonsonian comedy — Every Man in His Humour, it will be remembered, was the
first play to be performed by Dickens' amateur company, with
the novelist himself in the part of Bobadill. But too much
[118/119]
has been made of their typological aspect. Although
Dickens did not work from living models, he often
combined in one figure traits taken from different
individuals, or, conversely, distributed among several
characters the qualities observed in a single great
eccentric. When the chiropodist, Mrs. Hill, protested
against her portrait as Miss Mowcher in David
Copperfield, Dickens retorted that all his characters "being
made out of many people, were composite and never
individual." Some of the foibles of John Dickens crop
up in John Jarndyce and William Dorrit, as well as in
Micawber. The originality which Dickens exercised in
naming characters suggests that they were never con-
ceived purely as types. Bumble and Bounderby and
Pumblechook are ail blustering and officious fools; but
as the connotations of their names betoken, generic
likeness is sunk in idiosyncratic aberrations from the
norm.

Like seventeenth-century "humorous" characters
and their progeny in the novels of Smollett and Field-
ing, the immortal comic and grotesque creations of
Dickens' early period spring full-blown into existence,
with no possibility or need for further growth. The
scenes in which they appear are dramatically con-
structed to allow them to appear "in character," as it
were. Thus it may be said that in the novels from
Pickwick Papers to Martin Chuzzlewit the
action reveals, but does not develop, character. Chesterton
shrewdly observed of Dickens' practice at this time in
his career: ". . . the moving machinery exists only
to display entirely static character. Things in the
Dickens story shift and change only in order to give
us glimpses of great characters that do not change at
all."

Chesterton's statement, however, does not make
sufficient allowance for the surprise and pleasure
[119/120]
attending progressive revelation. While characters
certainly do not change in the sense that they are
psychologically transformed, their experiences lead to
behavior so unpredictable that growing familiarity is
attended by a constant sense of discovery. This
developing awareness, indeed, is a refraction of Dickens'
own delight in creation. With regard to Pecksniff and
Jonas Chuzzlewit he wrote Forster, while Martin
Chuzz1ewit was in progress:

As to the way in which these characters have opened out,
that is to me one of the mosr surprising processes of the
mind in this sort of invenrion. Given what one knows,
what one does nor know springs up; and I am as absolutely
certain of its being true, as I am of the law of gravitation —
if such a thing be possible — more so.

In Dickens' world character is never so inscrutable
as the circumstances which bring out its inherent
potentialities. Those two amiable buffoons, Dick
Swiveller and Toots, need only to fall in love to
become themselves lovable. And from that trio of limply
fatuous aristocrats, Cousin Feenix, Sir Leicester
Dedlock, and Twemlow, loyalty to the traditional values
of their order calls forth a wholly admirable display of
dignity.

Much as has been written about Dickens' supreme
humorous figures, they resist critical analysis. Like
their compeers, the great originals of Shakespearean
comedy, they enjoy a free and autonomous life,
uncircumscribed by the works in which they appear.
Theirs is the license traditionally accorded the clown,
whose antic disposition is a law unto itself. The
Dickensian comic spirit is unfailingly embodied in
histrionic guise. Its exemplars are self-declared fantasts,
"of imagination all compact." They inhabit a world
[120/121]
of their own making, a world which parodies, yet exists
in total defiance of reality, a world in which the
distinction between shadow and substance is turned
topsy-turvy. At the outset stands Sam Weller with his
inexhaustible store of analogues deriving from the
absurd reactions of nonexistent beings caught in
preposterous predicaments, and at the end there is Wegg,
vicariously involved in the doings of his imaginary
"Miss Elizabeth, Master George, Aunt Jane, and Uncle
Parker." In between comes Sairey Gamp, not by any
stretch of the fancy to be divorced from her fictitious
confidante, Mrs. Harris.

These beings live by the power of the spoken
word, though each has appropriated the resources of
language for ends that subvert all habitual channels of
communication. For them words are magic talismans,
expressive of a perpetual state of wish-fulfillment,
reordering actuality into conformity with felt needs.
Dick Swiveller's idiom with its hodgepodge of music
hall cliches provides the same escape from an
impoverished present that Flora Finching finds in the
lunatic disarray of her recollections. There is no
disappointment for which Micawber cannot compensate
by the triumphant exercise of his epistolary style.
Like Falstaff and the other clowns in Shakespeare,
Dickens' comedians are fully self-aware. They enact
their roles quite as much for their own delectation as
to impose on their auditors, even though, as the novelist
said, "My figures seem disposed to stagnate without
crowds about them." "The great fool," Chesterton
wrote, "is he in whom we cannot tell which is the
conscious and which the unconscious humour." This
ambiguity characterizes all of Dickens' greatest comic
scenes, but none more than those in which Micawber
appears. There is, for example, the unforgettable
episode when David, about to part from his friends, receives
[121/122]
the following lecture on the future conduct of
his affairs:

We had a very pleasant day, though we were all in a
tender state about our approaching separation.

"l shall never, Master Copperfield," said Mrs.
Micawber, "revert to the period when Mr. Micawber was in
difficulties, without thinking of you. Your conduct has
always been of the most delicate and obliging description.
You have never been a lodger; you have been a friend."

"My dear," said Mr. Micawber, "Copperfield," for so
he had been accustomed to call me of late, "has a heart to
feel for the distresses of his fellow-creatures when they are
behind a cloud, and a head to plan, and a hand to — in
short, a general ability to dispose of such available
property as could be made awav with."

I expressed my sense of this commendation, and said
I was very sorry we were going to lose one another.

"My dear young friend," said Mr. Micawber, "I am
older than you; a man of some experience in life, and --
and of some experience, in short, in difficulties, generally
speaking. At present, and until something turns up (which
I am, I may say, hourly expecting), I have nothing to
bestow but advice. Still my advice is so far worth taking
that — in short, that I have never taken it myself, and am
the" — here Mr. Micawber, who had been beaming and
smiling, all over his head and face, up to the present mo-
ment, checked himself and frowned — "the miserable
wretch you behold."

"My dear Micawber!" urged his wife.

"I say," returned Mr. Micawber, quite forgetting
himself and smiling again, "the miserable wretch you behold.
My advice is, never to do to-morrow what you can do
to-day. Procrastination is the thief of time. Collar him!"

"My poor papa's maxim," Mrs. Micawber observed.

"My dear," said Mr. Micawber, "your papa was very
well in his way, and Heaven forbid that I should
disparage him. Take him for all in all, we ne'er shall — in
short, make the acquaintance, probably, of anybody else
possessing, at his time of life, the same legs for gaiters,
and able to read the same description of print without
spectacles. But he applied that maxim to our marriage,
[122/123]
my dear; and that was so far prematurely entered into,
in consequence, that I never recovered the expense."

Mr. Micawber looked aside at Mrs. Micawber, and
added, "Not that I am sorry for it. Quite the contrary,
my love." After that he was grave for a minure or so.
"My other piece of advice, Copperfield," said Mr.
Micawber, "you know. Annual income twenty pounds,
annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty
pound ought and six, result misery. The blossom is
blighted, the leaf is withered, the God of day goes down
upon the dreary scene, and — and in short you are for ever
floored. As I am!"

To make his example more impressive, Mr. Micawber
drank a glass of punch with an air of great enjoyment
and satisfaction, and whistled the College Hornpipe.

The lesser comic characters in Dickens exhibit
the same extraordinary resilience and imaginative
supremacy over adversity, born of an unquenchable
inclination to idealize reality. The novels are thronged
with individuals w ho thus get along on theatrical
make-believe. Their company includes such foolish
widows as Mrs. Nickleby and Mrs. Sparsit; humble
artisans whose fancies are related to their callings like
Miss La Creevy and Jenny Wren; social impostors like
Turvevdrop and Mrs. General, with her fixation on the
"formation of a surface"; would-be philosophers, such
as the likable Captain Cuttle and the detestable Skimpole.

It is a recognized fact that Dickens' humorous vein
runs most richly through the early novels. Its thinning
out and turning acrid in the later work is commonly
attributed to a decline in the exuberant optimism of
the youthful years. But there are other reasons for
this apparent loss of comic verve more closely allied
with Dickens' artistic development. Professors Butt and
Tillotson have shown in Dickens at Work that on the
[123/124]rare occasions in his later career when the novelist
overwrote his monthly numbers, comic passages were
always the first to be sacrificed to space requirements.
The increasingly rigorous plot construction, first
manifest in Dombey and Son, entailed a more functional
view of characterization. Such characters as Major
Bagstock, Bounderby, and Podsnap are creatures of
their environments, giving lip service to the values
on which worldly reputation depends. In contrast to
the freedom enjoyed by their predecessors in the
early stories who belong to no definable social class,
these figures do not create for themselves private roles
to satisfy the hunger of the imagination, but rather
strut and fret through public parts, prescribed by their
notion of what is expected of them. As a result, their
playacting, expressive of the author's satiric intent, no
longer provokes the untrammeled laughter of a Sam
Weller or Mrs. Gamp or Micawber.

Strangely akin to these embodiments of the pure
comic spirit are the grotesque villains of Dickens' early
writings. Fagin, Squeers, Quilp, Pecksniff, even Uriah
Heep, are only to be distinguished from their antic
counterparts by a greater inclination and capacity to
cause hurt. Like the clowns, their unfailing vivacity
and resourcefulness constantly defy narrative restraint,
so that the scenes in which they appear seem staged to
release their sinister hilarity. Condemnable though
these figures may be, moral reprobation sinks before
the spectacle of Fagin schooling his gang of pick-
pockets, or Quilp bullying his wife by a display of
indiscriminate voracity, or Pecksniff liquorishly fon-
dling Mary Graham. For these characters also make
an enduring appeal through their histrionic virtuosity.
Old Martin Chuzzlewit is in reality paying grudging
tribute to this faculty when he says to Pecksniff:
[124/125]

"Why, the annoying quality in you, is . . . that you
never had a confederate or partner in your juggling; you
would deceive evervbody, even those who practise the
same arr; and have a way with you, as if you — he, he,
he! — as if you really believed yourself. I'd lay a handsome
wager now, . . . if I laid wagers, which I don't and
never did, that you keep up appearances by a tacit
understanding, even before your own daughters here....
You're not offended, Pecksniff?"

"Offended, my good sir!" cried that gentleman, as
if he had received the highest compliments that language
could convey.

In the later novels evil-doing, as has been said, is
presented under an instiutionalized aspect; and the
villains, as a general rule, no longer exhibit the same
malignant joy in wrong for its own sake. Already in
Barnaby Rudge, Dennis the hangman condones his
scoundrelism by appealing to the punitive legal system
of which he is a minion; and so barefaced a
malefactor as Blandois in Little Dorrit repeatedly insists
that he is a gentleman who conducts himself no whit
differently from respectable members of the business
and professional classes. Yet, although the behavior of
a Dombey or a Tulkinghorn or a Madame Defarge is
in part explicable by class affiliation, the rampant evil
in Dickens' world cannot finally be assimilated to any
social system. There lurks at its heart an insoluble
element suggestive of the novelist's ambivalent attitude
toward the sources of human motivation.

Much of the time Dickens seems to have subscribed
to the teaching of the political economists that
individuals are shaped by environment. Monks' diabolical
plot against Oliver is based on the assumption that the
boy cannot avoid being contaminated by association
with Fagin and his gang. "The wily old Jew," Dickens
writes, "had the boy in his toils. Having prepared his
[125/126]
mind, by solitude and gloom, to prefer any society to
the companionship of his own sad thoughts in such
a dreary place, he was now slowly instilling into his
soul the poison which he hoped would blacken it, and
change its hue for ever." Similarly, of Nicholas
Mckleby's appalled recognition that Dotheboys Hall
is a spawning-ground for every kind of vice, the
novelist says:

But the pupils — the young noblemen! How the last faint
traces of hope, the remotest glimmering of any good to
be derived from his efforts in this den, faded from the mind
of Nicholas as he looked in dismay around! Pale and
haggard faces, lank and bony figures, children with the
countenances of old men, deformities with irons upon
their limbs, boys of stunted growth, and others whose
long meagre legs would hardly bear their stooping bodies
all crowded on the view together; there were the bleared
eye, the hare-lip, the crooked foot, and every ugliness of
distortion that told of unnatural aversion conceived by
parents for their offspring, or of young lives which, from
the earliest dawn of infancy, had been one horrible en-
durance of cruelty and neglect. There were little faces
which should have been handsome, darkened with the
scowl of sullen, dogged suffering; there was childhood
with the light of its eye quenched, its beauty gone, and
its helplessness alone remaining; there were vicious-faced
boys, brooding, with leaden eyes, like malefactors in a
jail; and there were young creatures on whom the sins
of their frail parents had descended, weeping even for
the mercenary nurses they had known, and lonesome
even in their loneliness. With every kindly sympath~
and affection blasted in its birth, with every young and
healthy feeling flogged and starved down, with every
revengeful passion that can foster in swollen hearts, eating
its evil way to their core in silence, what an incipient
Hell was breeding here!

The warped natures of Smike in Nicolas Nickleby
and of Hugh in Barnaby Rudge are alike referable to
[126/127]
early neglect and maltreatment. And in the Preface
to Martin Chuzzlewit Dickens, somewhat unconvinc-
ingly, attempts to explain Jonas' criminal disposition
on the same grounds:

I conceive that the sordid coarseness and brutality of
Jonas would be unnatural, if there had been nothing in his
early education, and in the precept and example always
before him, to engender and develop the vices that make
him odious. But, so born and so bred, admired for that
which made him hateful, and justified from his cradle in
cunning, treachery, and avarice; I claim him as the legiti-
mare issue of the father upon whom those vices are seen
to recoil.

At other times Dickens' division of his characters
into camps, opposing unassailable virtue to immitigable
depravity, points to an essentially Manichaean habit
of mind. In answer to the charge that the portraiture
of Sikes was too unrelieved in its darkness, the author
offered the following tentative excuse in the Preface to
Oliver Twist:

. . . I fear there are in the world some insensible and
callous natures, that do become utterly and incurably bad.
Whether this be so or not, of one thing I am certain:
that there are such men as Sikes, who, being closely
followed through the same space of time and through the
same current of circumstances, would not give, by the
action of a moment, the faintest indication of a better
nature.

In the same novel the half brothers, Monks and Oliver,
stand in implausibly stark contrast. The malevolent
motivation of the one is as incomprehensible as is the
other's innate innocence, given the conditions under
which he grows up. A similar polarity of moral ab-
solutes creates an unbridgeable gulf between Quilp
and Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop.
[127/128]

Sceptical of organized charity and all other official
agencies for reform, Dickens relied on individual
benevolence to relieve suffering and misfortune. In the
early novels, as has been noted, this mission is entrusted
to the company of affluent and compassionate elders
which includes Pickwick, Brownlow, the Cheeryble
brothers, Garland, old Martin Chuzzlewit, Betsey
Trotwood, and John Jarndyce. Although the Cheeryble
brothers were inspired by a pair of philanthropic
Manchester industrialists, Dickens' portrayal of this type
is so deliberately lacking in realism that one may
doubt whether its exemplars were ever actual to their
creator in other than a symbolic sense. Their Olympian
hovering over the action of the stories, on which they
fortuitously intervene at opportune moments, suggests
that they belong to a transcendent order representative
of ideal charity. Esther Summerson, indeed,
acknowledges as much when she admits at the end of Bleak
House to feeling towards John Jarndyce "as if he
were a superior being. . . ."

Dickens' growing insight during the 1840S into the
organic constitution of Victorian society led to im-
portant developments in his methods of presenting
character, as well as to the perfecting of his narrative
art. A shift in perspective is reflected in the very titles
of the later novels. In contrast to the early works
named after their protagonists, Bleak House, Hard
Times, A Tale of Two Cities, Nobody's Fault (the
original title of Little Dorrit), Great Expectations, and
Our Mutual Friend call attention to the new emphasis
on theme within an expanding social focus. Edmund
Wilson was the first to point out that Dickens
originated "a new literary genre . . . the novel of the
social group." Beginning with Dombey and Son, there
is an increasing interaction between characters and
their cultural milieu. Motivation is determined more by
[128/129]
environmental pressures and less by the impulses of
the isolated and unrestrained ego. Society has assumed
the role of corporate villain, and hldividual
malefactions are made to seem symptomatic of prevalent
abuses. The victimized child is a recurrent figure in
Dickens' fiction from his earliest work; but in the
mature novels the all but universal neglect or abuse of
children by their parents is systematically elaborated
as one of the signs of the times. Dombey's pride, so
fatal to the happiness of his family, is a class pride,
typifying the irresponsible exercise of authority by
those in positions of rank and power. The novelist
ironically poses the question: "Was Mr. Dombey's
master-vice, that ruled him so inexorably, an un-
natural characteristic?" And he goes on: "It might be
worth while, sometimes, to inquire what Nature is,
and how men work to change her, and whether, in the
enforced distortions so produced, it is not natural to
be unnatural." Given a social order dedicated to the
perversion of all natural bonds, there is little to choose
between Dombey and all the other heartlessly self-
infatuated parents, including Mrs. Jellyby, Gradgrind,
William Dorrit, Podsnap.

Such is the power of institutionalized evil in these
later novels that individual philanthropy is of little
avail. John Jarndyce is helpless to safeguard his wards,
and Boffin seems almost to have been conceived as a
parodv of the Pickwickian savior. In Dickens' early
work, charity exists as a transcendent ideal, invading
the stories from outside in the persons of altruistic,
but essentially disengaged, benefactors. Florence Dombey
bey signalizes the emergence of new type to embody
the regenerative power of love, now represented as in-
hering within the social scene. She is the first of the
suffering girl heroines who play a redemptive role in
most of the subsequent novels. The category includes,
[129/130]
in addition to Florence, Agnes Wickfield, Esther
Summerson, Sissy Jupe, Amy Dorrit, Lizzie Hexam.
There is an unmistakable family likeness among
these characters. A development from the lost children,
Oliver Twist and Nell, of the earlier works, they
exhibit in fusion a number of traditional strains
associated with the archetypal figure of the saintly
innocent, as variously endorsed by New Testament
Christianity and the romantic glorification of
childhood.

The type can be enlarged to include the actual fools who
so often originate or are the occasion for meritorious actions
in Dickens' fiction: Smike, Barnaby Rudge, Mr. Dick, Maggy
in Little Dorrit, perhaps even Joe Gargery. Henry James,
who was less than sympathetic with these characters, wrote
of Jenny Wren in his review of Our Mutual Friend: "Like all
Mr. Dickens's pathetic characters, she is a little monster, . . .
she belongs to the troop of hunchbacks, imbeciles, and pre-
cocious children, who have carried on the sentimental busi-
ness in all Mr. Dickens's novels, the little Nells, the Smikes
the Paul Dombeys."

In virtually every respect, save incorruptibility
of heart, they stand at the farthest remove from the
images of paternal benignity. Whereas Pickwick and
his successors are aging and securely prosperous
members of the middle class, these figures are young girls,
usually destitute and invariably unprotected. Esther
is illegimate; Sissy and Lizzie come from the dregs
of society and are illiterate. All have lost their mothers
and have been neglected or otherwise mistreated by
fathers or surrogate parents. They resemble each other
in additional ways, which doubtless reflect Dickens'
dislike of nis own disorderly family life. They share
with their creator, for example, a kind of passion for
tidiness in their domestic arrangements. Of Nell, who
is in many ways the progenitor of the type, Gissing
wrote: "From the beginning of the story, when she is
seen making order and comfort in the gloomy old
house, to the end of her wanderings in the cottage by
[130/131]
the still churchyard, her one desire is for the peace
and security of home." Furthermore, like Nell,
Dickens' later heroines habitually reverse the customary
pattern of familial responsibility, the daughter
assuming the place of mother and wife to the erring father.
In every case the sovereign virtue which enables
these beings to remain irreproachably immaculate
amidst all the evil which environs them is a spiritual
holiness based on unreflecting trust in divine
providence. And their indubitable role in their respective
narratives is to embody the dynamic power of love, as
a touchstone for making moral discriminations among
the actions of all the other characters.

Although Dickens' girl heroines are much more
vitally involved in their stories than the patriarchal
benefactors whom they replace, they, like all of the
novelist's creatures who conform to type, are con-
ceived in fundamentally static terms. They are, how-
ever, frequently played off against a very different kind
of female character who testifies to Dickens' growing
concern with the psychological grounds of internal
conflict. For the later novels present a remarkable series
of women of passionate temperament, whose outbursts
of feeling and reckless actions signify divided natures.
They all, for one reason or another, have been
humiliated, placed on the defensive, and relegated to
the position of outsiders by society, with which they
seek to get even for their wounded self-esteem. Their
number includes Edith Dombey, Rosa Dartle, Lady
Dedlock and Hortense, Louisa Gradgrind, Fanny
Dorrit, Miss Wade and Tattycoram, and, with
significant differences, Estella and Bella Wilfer. Whether
innocent or guilty, all these fear, while at the same time
they resent and defy, the tyranny of opinion. The
sympathy which they in part compel as victims under
a moral code inequitable in its oppression of their sex
[131/132]
is counteracted by their erratic response to fancied
grievances. For all, like Miss Wade, are neurotic
self-tormentors, riven between hatred against those who
have used them and against themselves for submitting
to be so used. Dickens, however, could never rival
Richardson or Charlotte Brontë in fineness of insight
into the feminine nature; and the interest which these
characters arouse is dissipated through such
anticlimactic scenes as that between Edith Dombey and
Carker, or Rosa Dartle and Emily, or Louisa
Gradgrind and her father on the night of Harthouse's
attempted seduction.

Forster perceptively observed of Dickens' methods
of characterization that

no man could better adjust the outward and visible
oddities in a delineation to its inner and unchangeable
veracities. The rough estimates we form of character, if we
have any truth of perception, are on the whole correct:
but men touch and inrerfere with one another by the
contact of their extremes, and it may very often become
necessarily the main business of a novelist to display the
salient points, the sharp angles, or the prominences merely.

While generally true enough, this statement fails to
take into account Dickens' fascination with the
phenomenon of split personality or to give credit to his
techniques for dramatizing the buried motives which
individuals keep hidden from the world and even from
themselves. That the writer had developed to a high
degree the facultv of self-disassociation and was cap-
able of dispassionately probing his own subliminal
states of mind is apparent from his occasional
writings. In "A Fly-Leaf in a Life" from The
Uncommercial Traveller he speaks of "Being accustomed to ob-
serve myself as curiously as if I were another man
. . ."; and a second piece, entitled "Lying Awake"
gives an astonishing display of the power of
autosuggestion [132/133]
on the passive mentality. Not surprisingly,
then, in his more searching character studies, Dickens
takes account of the conditions of imaginative
awareness which lie on the borderline between the conscious
and the unconscious and which find expression in
dreams and related states.

Dickens' use of dreams for fictional purposes is
extremely sophisticated, anticipating in many respects
the findings of Freud. He is especially original in
exploiting what may be called the waking dream, in
which impressions derived from the surrounding world
merge with subjective imaginings. Oliver Twist
undergoes two such experiences, which leave in their wake
an intuitive sense of the evil threatening him. The first
occurs in Chapter 9 when Oliver "in a drowsy state,
between sleeping and waking" beholds Fagin sorting
over the jewelry which includes the trinket once in
the possession of the boy's dead mother. "At such
times," the author comments, "a mortal knows just
enough of what his mind is doing, to form some
glimmering conception of its mighty powers, its
bounding from earth and spurning time and space,
when freed from the restraint of its corporeal as-
sociate." The second and more sinister episode comes
in Chapter 34. Oliver's new-found security in the
Maylie household is shattered when he awakens from
a nap to the certainty that Fagin and Monks have been
watching him through the open window. The scene
is prefaced by this passage:

There is a kind of sleep that sreals upon us sometimes,
which while it holds the body prisoner, does not free the
mind from a sense of things abour it, and enable it to
ramble ar its pleasure. So far as an overpowering
heaviness, a prosrration of strengrh, and an utter inability tO
control our thoughrs or power of morion, can be called
sleep, this is it; and yet, we have a consciousness of all
[133/134]
that is going on about us, and, if we dream at such a
time, words which are really spoken, or sounds which
really exist at the moment, accommodate themselves with
surprising readiness to our visions, until reality and
imagination become so strangelv blended that it is afterwards
almost a matter of impossibility to separate the two. Nor
is this, the most striking phenomenon incidental to such
a state. It is an undoubred fact, that although our sense of
touch and sight be for the time dead, yet our sleeping
thoughts, and the visionary scenes that pass before us, will
be influenced and materially influenced, bv the mere
silent presence of some external object; which may not have
been near us when we closed our eves: and of whose
vicinity we have had no waking consciousness.

Equally ambiguous in their implications are the dis-
torted images of actuality that penetrate the drowsing
minds of Nell, frightened by the nocturnal apparition
of her father in the grip of his mania, and of Stephen
Blackpool holding vigil over his drunken wife.

Allied with the dream state are the hallucinations
which may torment the imagination under extreme
emotional stress. Pip prophetically foresees Miss
Havisham's death in the hanging effigy that appears to
him on his first visit to Satis House. And memories
of their long years of imprisonment come back to
unsettle the minds of William Dorrit in his final
collapse at Rome and Dr. Manette after Lucy's marriage.
Differing in effect but equally revelatory of conflicting
levels of apprehension are the watery visions which
precede Paul Dombey's death and which shadow
Eugene Wrayburn's struggle to survive.

Another device for dramatically projecting the
warring impulses in man's nature, and one which
particularly appealed to Dickens' imagination, is that of
doubling. Sometimes, as in the case of Flintwinch and
his twin brother, the novelist uses similarity in appearance
[134/135]
merely as a narrative contrivance. More often,
however, a character recognizes in his double the
more ideal or the more degraded half of his divided
being. Thus, Sydney Carton confronts his better
nature in Charles Darnay; and Edith Dombey's
discovery of spiritual kinship with the fallen Alice
Marwood provokes the surmise: "In this round world of
many circles within circles, do we make a weary
journey from the high grade to the low, to find at last
that they lie close together, that the two extremes
touch, and that our journey's end is but our
starting-place?"

These graphic methods of bringing to the surface
that clandestine other self which lurks in the inner
recesses of being are displayed with special adroimess
in the depictions of criminal behavior which are by
general agreement Dickens' psychological
masterpieces. R. H. Hutton, one of the novelist's earliest and
most sagacious critics, declared: "No author indeed
could draw more powerfully than he the mood of a
man haunted by a fixed idea, a shadowy apprehension,
a fear, a dream, a remorse...." And calling attention
to Dickens' success in presenting "the restlessness of a
murderer," Hutton comments on his knowledge of
Œ'the sort of supremacy which a given idea gets over the
mind in a dream, and in those waking states of neryous
apprehension akin to dreams." Dream psychology is
strikingly used to differentiate between two
contrasting kinds of criminal mentality in the nightmares which
visit Montague Tigg and Jonas Chuzzlewit on the eve
of the murder of one by the other. Jonas, furthermore,
is paralyzed by the hallucinatory conviction that he
has become two separate individuals, as he prepares,
after his deed of violence, to return to the room from
which he set out in disguise:
[135/136]

Dread and fear were upon him. To an extent he had never
counted on, and could not manage in the least degree. He
was so horribly afraid of that infernal room ar home. This
made him, in a gloomy, murderous, mad way, not only
fearful for himself bur of himself; for being, as it were,
a part of the room: a something supposed to be there,
yet missing from ir: he invested himself with irs mysteri-
ous terrors; and when he pictured in his mind the ugly
chamber, false and quiet, false and quiet, through the dark
hours of two nights; and the tumbled bed, and he nor in
it, though believed to be; he became in a manner his own
ghost and phantom, and was at once the haunting spirit
and the haunted man.

In like manner, subjective and objective reality
intermingle and are confused in the visions that accompany
the headlong flights of Sikes and Carker; and the
staring eyes of the dog that drive Sikes over the
parapet and the rushing of the engine that dismembers
Carker gradually take on for the reader the same
unearthly significance lent them in the demented
imaginations of the transgressors.

Lady Dedlock, Bradley Headstone, and John
Jasper brilliantly exemplify Dickens' handling of the
device of doubling to project complexity of motivation
in narrative terms. The true nature of each is revealed
through the disguises that he assumes. At different
times Lady Dedlock is identified with her fierce
maid-servant Hortense and Jenny, the brickmaker's wife.
The first deception helps create suspense about the
perpetrator of Tulkinghorn's murder; the second
serves to prolong the chase which fatally terminates at
the gates of the burial ground. At a deeper metaphori-
cal level, however, the two characters for whom Lady
Dedlock is mistaken represent the felonious and con-
science-stricken impulses contending in her breast.
Hortense in a very real sense is her symbolic agent in
settling accounts with the lawyer who has discovered
[136/137]her secret. In changing garb with Jenny, Lady Ded-
lock not only tacitly acquiesces to the common tie
which unites all forlorn mothers, but symbolically
atones for her failure in love toward her own daughter.
Bradley Headstone's plot to pin suspicion on
Rogue Riderhood is a subtle elaboration of Hortense's
similar scheme with regard to Lady Dedlock. Of
Bradley clad in his schoolmaster's attire the author writes
that "there was a certain stiffness in his manner of
wearing this, as if there were a want of adaptation
between him and it...." When he masquerades as
Riderhood, however, Dickens says: "And whereas,
in his own schoolmaster's clothes, he usually looked as
if they were the clothes of some other man, he now
looked in the clothes of some other man, or men, as if
they were his own." Bradley's hope that he can return
to his old self by shedding the incriminating raiment is
as unavailing as are his efforts to put behind him the
crime which he perpetually reenacts in his thoughts.
Riderhood's arrival to taunt him with the evidence of
his duplicity precipitates the teacher's symbolic gesture
of erasing his name which he has written on the black-
board. The denouement follows with inflexible logic;
for the circumstances of their deaths seal the fellow-
ship of these twin spirits.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood, even in its un-
finished form, carries to still more refined extremes
Dickens' exploration of the mysterious incongruities in
human motivation. The characterization of John
Jasper, lay precentor of Cloisterham Cathedral and
opium-eater, melodious singer and strangler, anticipates
Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. For in this
schizophrenic the two selves are fully internalized, and
the conflict between good and evil is traced to its
ultimate source in the irreconcilable duality of human
nature.[137/138]

No one has presented the corrosive effects of guilt
more vividly than Dickens. It, more than any other
force, motivates change, whether for better or worse,
in those of his characters who are not merely static.
Dickens' villains are customarily destroyed by guilt,
just as his protagonists are redeemed by its operation.
It works, however, in different ways, being an effect of
wicked actions, but a cause of noble conduct. Its
destructive power is manifest in Dickens' earliest
delineations of criminals, a Sikes or Ralph Nickleby. Not
until relatively late in his career did he succeed, largely
through its instrumentality, in creating psychologically
convincing roles for the heroes of his stories.

The youthful "leads" who give their names to the
early novels or who are nominally apportioned
prominent parts in them, Nicholas Nickleby, Kit Nubbles,
Jo Willett, Martin Chuzzlewit, Walter Gay, remain for
the most part insubstantial figures. Bourgeois
variations on the picaro seeking his fortune through
adversity, they emerge unscathed from their adventures
to enjoy the reward of the conventional happy ending.
David Copperfield is the first of Dickens' protagonists
who recognizably grows to maturity as a result of the
trials he passes through. His characterization is the
combined result of Dickens' deepened social
awareness and of his need to impose a meaningful pattern on
his own early experiences. In this novel, furthermore,
Dickens first seriouslv confronted a challenge which
he shared with other Victorian novelists: namely, the
problem of locating within the context of contempo-
rary manners and morals the grounds for heroic
action. His solution to this problem, paralleling similar
efforts by Thackeray,
Trollope, and
Meredith, was to
seek to redefine the traditional concept of the
gentleman in conformity with Victorian ideals. In David's
eyes, it is Steerforth and not himself who is the hero
[138/139]
of the story through half its course. And, indeed, the
two figures strangely complement each other. Both
exhibit a certain ruthlessness in pursuing their ends.
Without the narrator's proneness to self-delusion,
Steerforth lacks the saving grace of fellow-feeling for
the sensibilities of others which mitigates David's
weakness. His egoism and readiness to capitalize on his
personal charm and the prerogatives of social rank
reappear in such gentlemen manque's as Harthouse in
Hard Times and Henry Gowan in Little Dorrit. On
the other hand, Steerforth repays David's idolatry
with genuine, if condescending, affection; and he is
sufficiently shamefaced over his failure to live up to
the image he has instilled in David's heart to part with
him before the final betrayal. If Steerforth so often
usurps interest from the protagonist, it is because his
conduct exhibits signs of inner stresses of conscience
from which David is exempt as a result of the better
fortune contrived for him.

Richard Carstone, whose deterioration under the
seductive vision of unmerited gain carried out the
author's original plan for Walter Gay, is a transitional
figure, anticipating the more complexly motivated
protagonists of subsequent novels. Arthur Clennam,
Sydney Carton, Pip, and Eugene Wrayburn are
inheritors of Richard's well-meaning, but vacillating,
nature. Like him, also, they nurture undefined,
although deeply ingrained, feelings of guilt, which
relate them in many ways to the malefactors for whom
Dickens compels sympathy. It was one of the novelist's
great original insights that unjust treatment may be
fully as effective as actual wrongdoing in arousin~
feelings of remorse and self-doubt. In The Old
Curiosity Shop Kit Nubbles' anguish at being falsely
accused occasions the following passage of commentary:
[139/140]

Let moralists and philosophers say what they may, it is
very questionable whether a guilty man would have felt
half as much misery that night, as Kit did, being innocent.
The world, being in the constant commission of vast
quantities of injustice, is a little too apt to comfort itself
with the idea that if the victim of its falsehood and
malice have a clear conscience, he cannot fail to be sustained
under his trials, and somehow or other to come right at
last; "in which case," sav they who have hunted him
down, " — though we certainly don't expect it — nobody
will be better pleased than we." Whereas, the world
would do well to reflect, that injustice is in itself, to every
generous and properlv constituted mind, an injury, of all
others the most insufferable, the most torturing, and the
most hard to bear; and that many clear consciences have
gone to their account elsewhere, and many sound hearts
have broken, because of this very reason, the knowledge
of their own deserts only aggravating their sufferings, and
rendering them the less endurable.

Although reproachless, Florence Dombey cannot shed
the conviction that she is somehow to blame for her
father's hostility. Of the state of mind which ensued
on his brutal whipping by Murdstone, David
Copperfield says: "My stripes were sore and stiff, and made
me cry afresh, when I moved; but they were nothing
to the guilt I felt. It lay heavier on my breast than if
I had been a most atrocious criminal, I dare say." And
Pip nurses a residue of self-recrimination as a result
of his sister's harsh treatment.

Guilt, instilled by injustice, has in Dickens' view
the invariable effect of paralyzing the wills of its
victims. The resulting apathy made up in equal
measure of self-pity and distrust of active engagement in
outside affairs, is brilliantly exemplified by the
narrator of the strange short story entitled, "George
Silverman's Explanation," as well as in Miss Wade's "The
History of a Self-Tormentor." Such poseurs as
Harthouse [140/141]and Gowan and Bentley Drummle make much
of this lassitude as an aspect of their gentlemanly
pretensions. The self-lacerating habit of mind which it
induces in more consequential figures is most
penetratingly explored in Little Dorrit, where it is associated
not only with Mrs. Clennam's gloomy Calvinism, but
with all the other socially sanctioned forms of egoism
which incapacitate the characters in this novel.
William Dorrit is not less disabled by his assumption of
grandeur than Merdle is by his false eminence as a
financier or Casby by his patriarchal posture or Miss
Wade by her masochistic delusions.

Humphry House noted that Dickens' view of
human nature does not allow for the concept of original
sin. Its place is taken by the complex of penitential
feelings which enmesh the novelist's most deeply
studied characters — feelings which, although they
originate in some private conviction of failure or
insufficiency, carry with them a sense of responsibility
for the evil perpetrated by others. As a result, for all
these individuals the inertia imposed by the
self-inflicted consciousness of guilt seeks release in acts of
vicarious atonement for the actual guilt of others.
Arthur takes on himself the burden of Mrs. Clennam's
unrevealed secret, and Rokesmith sacrifices his in-
heritance to make amends for the eccentric provisions
of old Harmon's will.

In Dickens' world love is the only force strong
enough to burst the bonds the imprisoning ego and
to release the capacity for genuinely altruistic action.
This is not the divisive sexual passion, which is really
another form of self-love. A late discovery in Dickens'
fiction, its power destroys Bradley Headstone and John
Jasper, leading to deeds of violence which only
confirm their dreadful isolation from their kind. The characters
[141/142]who achieve self-transcendence are the ones who
undergo a change of heart, having learned through
suffering to prefer a good other than their own.

Allegorical implications hover over Dickens'
representations of spiritual redemption.
The fact cannot be too strongly emphasized, however, that
Dickens invariably took pains to knit his thematic concerns
into the texture of the narrative proper. For example, the
expectations raised by Jarvis Lorry's password, "Recalled to
Life" at the start of A Tale of Two Cities, are
circumstantially satisfied by the recovery of Dr. Manette. It is only in
the context of the entire train of events leading up to Sydney
Carton's heroic sacrifice that the phrase takes on full
metaphorical significance. The same is true for the splendid irony
of the remark made at the end of Chapter 2 by Jerry Cruncher
whose gruesome calling as a Resurrection-Man has yet to be
revealed: "'Recalled to life.' That's a Blazing strange message.
Much of that wouldn't do for you, Jerry! I say, Jerry! You'd
be in a Blazing bad way, if recalling to life was to come into
fashoion, Jerry!"

Although most clearly announced in A Tale of Two Cities, the
theme of resurrection is common to all the late novels.
Dombey and Son first establishes a recurrent pattern
in which the regeneration of a central character is
preceded by a period of illness or nervous disorder.
Florence Dombey saves her father from suicide. David
Copperfield is free to seek out Agnes only after a
period of probation in Switzerland. Arthur Clennam
undergoes purgation in the Marshalsea. Joe Gargery
returns to nurse Pip through the sickness which ensues
on Magwitch's death. John Rokesmith emerges with
a new identity from near-drowning; and Eugene
Wrayburn, broken in body and spirit, is quite literally
reborn. In each instance, recovery conforms to the
stages in the experience of conversion. The individual,
having passed through his dark night of despair,
affirms his recovery by some deed of expiation. These
deeds are manifold in their points of moral reference;
they may be motivated by a desire on the doer's part
[142/143]
to compensate for his own past transgressions; but in
their salvific effects on the lives of others they
incarnate the triumph of love over evil. Thus, Sydney
Carton's death, in saving the husband of his beloved,
at the same time redeems both the inhumanity of
Darnay's aristocratic forbears and, more directly
through his kindness to the seamstress, the matching
inhumanity of the revolutionary tribunal. By
succoring Magwitch, Pip does not simply repay in full his
debt to his benefactor, but makes up for Compeyson's
betrayal of Magwitch and his own of Joe.

The cases of Clennam and Wrayburn are slightly
different, since each is tangibly recompensed for his
transformation (as is also true for Pip in the revised
ending of Great Expectations). Yet, each acts without
expecting reward; and neither story, as has been
pointed out, can be said to end in unclouded felicity.
For in rededicathlg themselves to the happiness of
Amy Dorrit and Lizzie Hexam, both Arthur and
Eugene bring to their unions the contrite knowledge
that through their own previous misprisal of the
treasures of devotion offered them, they have helped
confirm the martyr's role reserved for saints in this
world. Nevertheless, Dickens is finally saying that
salvation from the blight of the social will can only
come through the reconstitution of the individual will
by love.